Subcontracting protestors jailed

by Anthony Garvey



An Irish court has set off a storm of protest in the country's booming construction industry by jailing two workers involved in a campaign against bogus subcontracting.

Hundreds of supporters stopped work at sites across Eire while others staged sit-downs in Dublin's O'Connell Street, halting all city traffic. The two, bricklayer David McMahon and labourer William Rogers, had refused to lift an unofficial picket mounted on a Dublin site as part of the campaign and were sent to Mountjoy Prison by a High Court judge until they agreed to do so.

The men were released after two nights in prison, when the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) agreed to hold talks with the Building and Allied Trades Union (BATU), which has been spearheading the campaign. The two were carried shoulder-high from the High Court by fellow workers amid pledges that the fight would go on.

The conflict centres on claims that some unscrupulous builders are using subcontracting as a device to avoid giving workers the benefits to which they are entitled by law, such as pensions, sick pay and holiday pay. The workers, it is claimed, are forced to operate as bogus subcontractors, thus saving builders up to 12 per cent of payroll costs per year.

Niall Irwin of the Plasterers' Union has claimed that around 50,000 people are falsely declaring to be self-employed when they are really PAYE employees. Recent figures from the Revenue Commissioners indicate that of the 120,000 in the industry, only 64,000 are on PAYE.

The battle has now been taken up by a group calling itself Building Workers Against the Black Economy, drawn from different unions in the industry. It has been mounting unofficial pickets at major sites in support of building workers' rights to be treated as PAYE employees and accorded their full entitlements.

The fear is that if the issue is not soon resolved, the campaign could cause serious disruption to the country's building boom.

BATU won a significant victory earlier this year when one of Eire's largest construction firms, G&T Crampton, agreed to employ bricklayers directly.

That agreement came after a marathon dispute involving site pickets that lasted for almost a year.

The union claimed that subcontracting is directly related to site safety and the rush to finish jobs is putting lives at risk. Eighteen workers have already died in Irish site accidents so far this year, three more than in the previous 12 months.

But the CIF insisted that subcontracting is an essential element of the industry and must be maintained. It cited the situation in the UK, where it claimed subcontracting has been shown to represent no threat to safety in the industry.